#
Everything about cricket has changed and in this time everything about India has also changed.
#
More than 60% of the country today was born after the first economic liberalisation of 1991
#
and the social and cultural changes have been vast.
#
Equally, in this time, technology has also taken quantum leaps
#
and the world in 2018 would seem a science fiction world to the boy of 1991.
#
How could cricket not change?
#
Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioural science.
#
Please welcome your host, Amit Bhatma.
#
Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
#
My episode last week was called The Evolution of Everything,
#
in which my brilliant guest, Matt Ridley, described how Charles Darwin and Adam Smith had the same grand idea
#
and how everything evolves in bottom-up ways.
#
We spoke about the universe, about life, language, cities, economy and the sense of self in that context.
#
Well, today's episode is about the evolution of cricket
#
and my guest is someone who's been a hero of mine for a couple of decades now.
#
Harsha Bhogle is a legend of cricket commentary,
#
but he embodies a pleasant contradiction of being both a larger-than-life figure,
#
as a celebrity stature makes him, as well as being down-to-earth and humble.
#
He showed great kindness to me in my past life as a cricket journalist, which I suspect he may not even remember,
#
and I was delighted when he agreed to appear on The Scene and The Unseen
#
to talk about how cricket has evolved in the course of his nearly three decades in the game.
#
But before we cut to the conversation I had with him, let's take a quick commercial break.
#
What's more, Indian Colours now has an exciting range of new products,
#
including fridge magnets with some stunning motifs and salad bowls and platters made of mango wood.
#
Their artists include luminaries like Babu Xavier, Vazvo X Vazvo, Brinda Miller, Dilip Sharma, Shruti Nelson and Pradeep Mishra.
#
They accept bulk orders for corporate and festival gifting,
#
but even if you want to buy just for yourself or a friend, head on over to IndianColours.com, that's Colours with an OU.
#
And if you want a 20% discount, apply the code IVM20. That's IVM for IVM Podcasts.
#
IVM20 for a 20% discount at IndianColours.com.
#
Harsha, welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
#
Harsha, it's great to finally have you on the show.
#
And before we start talking about how cricket has evolved over the last 25-30 years that you've been part of the business,
#
tell me a little bit more about how you got into becoming a cricket journalist.
#
I mean, you weren't always a television guy, right? You started off as a lowly print person like me.
#
I love the use of the word lowly, but long before the lowly print guy was a guy doing stuff on Yuvvani in Hyderabad,
#
I was doing a little bit of radio commentary, actually.
#
I did my first ball-by-ball broadcast when I was, what, 19 years old.
#
It was a Ranji Trophy game.
#
Learned a lot. Learned what people should not do and told myself,
#
when I become the senior broadcaster, these are things I will not do to younger people working with me.
#
But, yeah, print happened because I started traveling, I started touring, and print was a source of revenue.
#
And it was allowing me to cover up for other pursuits that were not going to pay me.
#
And were you also a cricketer yourself when you started?
#
I enjoyed playing cricket. I played, what, 7-8 years of cricket in Hyderabad.
#
I played 3 years of senior division cricket, which means I was playing the A1 division every Sunday.
#
I played 2-3 inter-college finals, got picked for my university.
#
It's a very nice, convenient story for people to say, this guy didn't play cricket.
#
I wish I could have shown them the four black marks on my thighs when we were still without thigh pads.
#
And I can tell you, I know the pain.
#
And you were a batsman, obviously, I presume?
#
Everybody had to bat. We were playing on matting wickets, so batting wasn't such a challenge.
#
But I started off being an off-spinner for my school team.
#
And then one day this kid turned up at the Nets.
#
So the two of us bowling off-spin for school for a year.
#
And then one day this kid turns up and I looked at him and I said, dude, this guy's in a different league.
#
So I started bowling leg-spinning. That's what I bowled for the rest of my life.
#
Who was that kid? I thought the story was going to end.
#
No, no. He played for India schools, actually.
#
He went from the Nets to our school Nets to India schools in one year, the same year.
#
Started off the school Nets in 6 or 8 months he was playing for India schools.
#
His name was Anant Vatsalya.
#
He was a fantastic off-spinner.
#
You just, I mean, I've always been reasonably good at knowing what I can't do.
#
So I looked at him and I said, you can't do this. So I started bowling leg-breaks.
#
And that's what I did till I finished university.
#
And how did you make the transition into full-time journalism and then from print into television?
#
Journalism because I was writing a little bit in Hyderabad.
#
And then, of course, I came to Mumbai.
#
And I wrote the odd piece here, the odd piece there.
#
I was working with a professional management group at the time.
#
And while I was at Rediffusion Advertising before that, I had a couple of pieces published,
#
including one in Debonair for Anil Dharkar, but it was about umpiring.
#
I'm going to look up that issue.
#
Yes, it was about umpire.
#
I read Debonair for the articles.
#
Of course, everyone does. Everybody does.
#
That's what they said about Playboy as well.
#
And yeah, so one day Tariq Ansari calls me and said, would you want to do the England tour for us?
#
And he's the owner of Midday, of course.
#
He then was the owner of Midday.
#
Actually, when I left PMG, he said, look, we've got three young women on our sports desk.
#
Can you just help them make the pages?
#
So come for two hours in the morning, that's it.
#
And the three young girls all went on to have pretty good careers.
#
One was Hemal Ashar, who worked for Midday.
#
There's Prajwal Hegde, who still writes very well on tennis.
#
And Sharda Agra, who I've grown to admire ever since.
#
She's a legend. And in fact, the other two as well.
#
There you are. So those were the three young people there.
#
So I'd go for two hours in the morning.
#
And this was sort of March, April.
#
And then in May, he said, do you want to do the England tour for us?
#
Why you and why not one of the women?
#
Well, to be fair, they were very young.
#
They were starting out.
#
They were all excellent writers and they still are.
#
But they were just starting out.
#
In fact, I did 1990. By 91, Sharda was going around on tours.
#
I said, Tariq, whatever you do, don't change your mind.
#
And he said, so how much will it cost?
#
I said, I have no idea.
#
And he said, whatever you do, don't accept less than 30 pounds a day.
#
So Tariq was very generous.
#
He gave me a hundred dollars a day, which was about 55, 56 pounds.
#
But I had to organize all my travel, my stay, everything.
#
When I write a book, I'll write the story about that.
#
And a manual typewriter with spare paper, carbon paper, spare ribbons,
#
lugging it around everywhere.
#
And then Telex moved to fax.
#
Now I'm sounding like I'm 200 years old.
#
Who were the writers who kind of inspired you, the cricket writers?
#
I mean, as a kid, we used to get Times of India in the afternoon.
#
And we'd read K N Prabhu's reports.
#
But to be honest, the couple of broadcasters I enjoyed were Diki Ratnagar
#
And Anand Sethulwar had a lovely cadence about his voice.
#
And it would go lovely up and down and up and down.
#
And I said, wow, that sounds nice.
#
And for us, the biggest hero growing up was Ameen Sayani
#
because we'd all listened to Binaka Geetmala.
#
Remarkable voice as well.
#
And from print to broadcast, how did that come about?
#
Actually, I'd done broadcast earlier because I was doing radio commentary in Hyderabad.
#
I carried a cassette player to my senior division league game.
#
I'm batting six, seven something.
#
So our openers are batting.
#
And I recorded commentary on that, took it to All India Radio.
#
But I did a little bit of radio commentary there.
#
By the time I went to Ahmedabad, I had already done a few Ranji Trophy games.
#
While I was in Ahmedabad, I did two one-day international and a test match.
#
And was the nature of commentary different at that time?
#
Like one of the shifts that sort of happened was, you know,
#
and this happened in television commentary.
#
So maybe it's not relevant to this.
#
But, you know, back in the day, Richie Beno's advice, legend goes,
#
used to be that you only say something when you're really adding value.
#
There's no need to describe every shot because, hey, the viewer can see that.
#
And that apparently changed in your time as a television.
#
This thing where the brief was just fill every moment.
#
Keep talking. Don't stop.
#
I mean, if you paused as much as Beno, they'd put a commercial in.
#
Seriously. Radio commentary in India has disintegrated.
#
Radio commentary in India had its highs in the 70s, 80s, 90s.
#
There were some wonderful broadcasters, quirky, original.
#
Even if you want to come down from Pearson, Surita, and Devraj Puri,
#
and all the others, down to Anand Settelwar,
#
Dicky Ratnagar, Raj Singh was pretty good himself.
#
There's some Hindi broadcasters.
#
Suresh Saraya had a style of his own.
#
So there were some really good radio broadcasters,
#
and we haven't had one since.
#
There's a couple of good ones. Prakash Vakankar is good.
#
Sunil Gupta is good, but All India Radio is no.
#
I guess part of the reason is a lot of the cricket lovers back then
#
must have been following cricket through radio.
#
So they listen to radio.
#
Today, I suppose very few people do.
#
In India, not in Australia and England, where radio has held its own.
#
The trick is to do on one medium
#
what a more powerful medium either cannot do or does not want to do.
#
Television is a very powerful medium,
#
but television is very arrogant.
#
It has a huge ego, television.
#
Television will not be gentle and mild and polite and fun and informal,
#
And so radio must do what television cannot do.
#
But in India, we don't have radio commentary at all.
#
Whatever there is, occasionally we wish there wasn't.
#
And so literally just a few months back when I was on Crick Buzz,
#
and we wanted to start Crick Buzz Live,
#
and we said we don't have a single second of footage.
#
So we can't compete with television.
#
So how do you then compete with television?
#
You do everything that television will not do.
#
Just three people sitting and chatting about cricket.
#
And we chat about cricket for 25 minutes before the play.
#
We talk about the team, we talk about the page,
#
we talk who's playing, not playing.
#
But it's an uninterrupted 25-minute conversation with loads of laughter.
#
And we're getting a lot of views.
#
And one of the interesting kind of shifts that happened in commentary itself
#
before we get to talking about cricket in a general way,
#
was that sometime around the mid-90s,
#
there was this cult of celebrity where essentially it became the rule
#
that all commentators had to be ex-cricketers themselves.
#
And ex-test-cricketers are essentially brought in.
#
Like the logic would go that,
#
hey, ex-cricketers would have more insight about how to play the game.
#
But they were essentially brought in for celebrity value.
#
And you were suddenly the only non-ex-cricketer in those terms to be in the frame.
#
How did that transition impact you? How did you respond to it?
#
Luckily, I started before this happened.
#
So when this came around,
#
I still remember my first proper television gig was the Hero Cup in 93.
#
And by the time the Hero Cup came,
#
I'd already done commentary in Australia.
#
I'd been on BBC World Service.
#
There weren't a lot of English voices that had worked on professional networks before.
#
So I got to do the Hero Cup.
#
I got to do a bit of television.
#
By then, only Gavaskar was around.
#
By 94, Ravi Shastri came in.
#
By the late 90s, Sanjay Manzarekar came in.
#
So I was lucky that I was in there before.
#
Well, I wasn't competing with them,
#
which is why in that famous interview I told Karan Thapar that I'm the non-striker.
#
When I was batting, I always seemed to be batting with someone who was batting better than me.
#
And did that change your brief?
#
Because I imagine when you do radio commentary, you're doing it essentially as equals.
#
Everyone's got his opinions.
#
You're just chatting, you're shooting the breeze.
#
But did your brief become, in this case, to be a sort of a sutradhar or an enabler
#
where you have to ask questions and get insights out of these stars
#
rather than necessarily opine a lot on your own?
#
It was not just inevitable.
#
It was appropriate as well.
#
Because I played school, college, university.
#
I know what it is to hit the ball off the middle of a bat.
#
I know the joy of holding a cricket, of catching a catch that shouldn't have been caught.
#
But I have no idea of the pressure of going out to play on the first morning of a boxing day test.
#
So if I pretended that I knew, or if I said to somebody,
#
you know what, his head is falling over when he plays the drive,
#
it might be falling over, but I lay myself open to people saying,
#
but how on earth do you know?
#
And whether I know or don't know, I have to presume I don't know.
#
But I found that I could get people to say what the average Joe wanted to.
#
So therefore, willingly or otherwise, I became the voice of the common man in the commentary box.
#
And they said, you know what, he asked the questions that we wanted to ask.
#
So you're right. So that's how I became a facilitator.
#
Radio commentary is completely different. Radio commentary is a million times easier.
#
Oh, any day. Radio commentary is very, very easy because you can't go wrong.
#
Because unless you lie, how do you go wrong on a radio broadcast?
#
Because on radio broadcast, you're just telling people what you see.
#
So I don't know if you remember this. When India toured Pakistan in 2006, I had come along.
#
I was covering that tour for The Guardian and also writing for Cricket for where I worked at the time.
#
And I also had this gig where I had to do like a 60 second update for BBC every day, a number of times a day.
#
And I was struggling with that. And I remember you were very kind to actually come on your own
#
and sit with me and give me a lot of great advice at the time, which I still remember and appreciate.
#
But one of the things that struck me when I was trying to do that, to give those 60 second updates,
#
not live or anything, just 60 seconds, is that as a writer, while I could always search for the right phrase
#
or the right image and avoid cliches, when I actually started speaking,
#
the only thing which would come into my head were cliches like, you know, like a tracer bullet and so on.
#
Nothing else would pop into my head. It became so...
#
Not your fault. It's not your fault you were listening to the wrong people.
#
Oh my God, you're actually saying that on record.
#
I mean, look, cliches are cliches because they're true. That's why they are cliches, because they're true.
#
But on radio, that is an imperative that you have, that you have to just keep talking.
#
And therefore, how do you find fresh ways of describing what is happening?
#
You can't bring that sort of calculated, careful look that you can when you write such a piece.
#
Some people rehearse sentences.
#
I was once told by Peter Baxter, who was the celebrated producer of Test Math Special,
#
that a lot of Ahlat's best lines, a lot of his best off-the-cuff lines were often the most rehearsed.
#
They were often the most scripted.
#
So sometimes you would say, right, if this happens, I think I'll say that.
#
So you need to ensure that you're not too eager to throw out the line because you've prepared it.
#
It's almost like I've prepared for my civics exam, but they haven't asked me what I've prepared, so I'll say it nonetheless.
#
You don't do that, but you know that if that comes, that's what I'm going to say.
#
But some people do that. I never did because it put too much pressure on you,
#
because you were constantly waiting for a situation to arrive for which your favorite line was best suited.
#
And so sometimes you did a force fit, and it never really worked.
#
So the best thing to do is to go out there and say, you know what, I'm the most blessed person on the planet.
#
So let me share my happiness with people.
#
And that's how it comes.
#
But the BBC World Service was one of the most valuable things in my life because it taught me time.
#
So very often I'd be given 45 seconds to go, and I'm doing this live in the middle of a game.
#
So I'm sitting behind a commentary box using the producer's phone and making a collect call.
#
You used to have these AT&T collect calls. Do an AT&T collect call.
#
Somebody in London picks it up, asks for the password. I give the password.
#
They patch me on, and now I'm live. I've got to hear the anchor there in the studio call my name.
#
And of course, as he's saying, right, it's time to go now to India, a wicket falls,
#
and we don't live in soundproof commentary boxes in India.
#
And so I can no longer hear the person at the other end.
#
But to cut the noise, I would actually go under the table to try and cut the noise.
#
But now the problem comes, you have only two hands.
#
You have to have the watch in front of you because 45 seconds can mean 42 or 48,
#
but it cannot mean 35 or 55.
#
So you need the watch in one hand.
#
You need to have the phone in the other, and you need to have the scorecard in front of you.
#
And you need to be in a quiet place. You need four hands.
#
And I wasn't a god. I only had two hands.
#
And if you do that, if you try to jam the phone against your ear, then it doesn't sound right.
#
And then the wind would blow, and so the paper would blow away.
#
But I learned in all those times what 45 seconds was.
#
And to gather your thoughts so that on that watch in front of you, when it goes to 35,
#
you know you've got to start winding up.
#
By 41, 42, you're almost done.
#
So I learned timing doing that.
#
So if you're given 45 seconds, you say, these are the only two points I can speak.
#
I can't get the whole story of the match in. I prioritize.
#
If he comes back and tells me, you know what, we didn't get through to the guy in Frankfurt,
#
we've actually got 140 for you now.
#
You've got to do 140, but in your mind, then you can say,
#
okay, I've got a third or fourth thing I can include in the broadcast.
#
So that was one of my biggest learnings.
#
I think in 2006, in fact, I was doing exactly that 45 second thing.
#
And that same thing would happen if something happened on the field in front of me
#
while the call has come through, like a wicket falls or someone hits a four or something changes.
#
And I would just get extremely flustered.
#
But that was actually an opportunity, because that means on a broadcast,
#
you could tell them live what was happening.
#
Which is amazing, yeah.
#
I was too naive at that time to kind of manage.
#
Again, before we go on to the cricket, if you had to sort of give young would-be commentators
#
on cricket in any medium that involves speaking advice, what would you say?
#
Well, peculiarly, the first thing I would say is pick all pieces of ego in your brain
#
and trample them to death.
#
Because if you have an ego, you've got no chance in life.
#
I meet a lot of young presenters who want to be prime time television heroes on day zero.
#
It's not going to happen.
#
You are going to make mistakes.
#
And the best time to make mistakes is when nobody's watching.
#
So give yourself pre-Ranji Trophy.
#
Finish making all your mistakes.
#
Then when you're ready, you're ready.
#
So actually, I tell everybody to start doing audio.
#
Because the camera is this big enticing thing that makes you look at it a certain way.
#
And then it causes you to freeze.
#
One of the things I always tell people is why do models always make bad anchors?
#
Because the models are so obsessed with the angle and the light and the way they look.
#
But then what are you going to say?
#
And being a good anchor to some extent, does it just involve just relaxing and letting things happen
#
rather than being conscious and maintaining exactly that pose and this expression?
#
The beauty of live television is you don't even have time to think which pose you're in or where you are.
#
I've had water thrown on me on a live telecast.
#
I've had people yanking me in all directions.
#
The advantage of the live telecast is you don't have to be perfect.
#
So I often tell people a live telecast anchor is like a fighter pilot.
#
He just lands, picks up, goes.
#
Whereas a recorded anchor, if you're doing Indian Idol or you're doing Konbanega Karodpati,
#
then you're like a passenger liner.
#
Where everything is correct and someone's opening the wine and the business class
#
and someone's just walking down and someone's showing you to their place.
#
And the livery is perfect.
#
No, in live telecast, no.
#
I mean, there are days when my armpits have been soaked.
#
There are days where I'm wearing a jacket, not because I want to wear a jacket,
#
because I sweated so much I could squeeze my shirt.
#
There are days when I've got droplets falling off my eyes, but that's okay.
#
But if you start to think, oh, how am I looking?
#
Is my makeup coming off a little bit?
#
Then your focus is not on communication.
#
And the reason you're there is to communicate, not to worry about how you look.
#
If the way people looked made them successful, then I wouldn't have passed the first exam.
#
And obviously, the first responsibility of a broadcaster,
#
of a TV commentator is obviously towards the viewers.
#
But at the same time, did you also feel that as time went on and players became more powerful,
#
that there was also another audience in play,
#
that you had to be conscious about what you can or cannot say about some player,
#
that you have to moderate yourself in terms of maybe pissing the board off or whatever.
#
But do those considerations come into play?
#
I was blessed, Amit, that my best years in television,
#
and I'm saying this very confidently because I know they've gone,
#
that my best years in television coincided with the best set of human beings that played cricket.
#
There was a Tendulkar, there was a Lakshman, there was a Dravid, there was a Kumbale,
#
there was a Srinath, there was a Ganguly.
#
And I broadcast through their entire career.
#
There was not one day, not one day that one of them came up and said,
#
you know what, I didn't like what you said.
#
I can't say the same about the generation that followed.
#
I understand. And I won't push you onto that. Let's move on to the cricket.
#
It also happened because of social media.
#
Because of social media, there's people saying all kinds of things
#
and people start to believe what they see on social media.
#
Is it something you're comfortable talking about because otherwise I won't push you?
#
No, suppose, very simply, suppose I've said, oh, he played a poor shot on 99.
#
Now, it's all right to say that.
#
Somebody on social media will then start a rant saying,
#
oh, you don't like him. That's why you said that.
#
Like, for example, I've been told that I'm a Mumbaiker
#
and so I reserve my best expressions for Tendulkar.
#
And I'm told, you're from Hyderabad,
#
so you sound far better when you're talking about Lakshman.
#
So people will read what they want to.
#
When they read that and then it starts getting a life of its own,
#
then it reaches somebody.
#
And then people start to misinterpret these things.
#
So the arrival of social media has added a lot of toxicity to communication.
#
And so you've got to be extra careful with the arrival of social media.
#
Let's kind of move on to the cricket now.
#
It's my sense that over the time that you've been in cricket,
#
the 25, 30 years or so,
#
there have been two major inflection points which have changed cricket.
#
I mean, tell me if you agree and if you want to add to these or add caveats.
#
One is the satellite television explosion in the 90s,
#
which just changed the commerce of the game entirely
#
and made India the hub of world cricket
#
and made players into superstars and everything changed there.
#
And the second would be in a slightly different sense,
#
the T20 IPL revolution that had the same kind of commercial impacts,
#
but also it changed the game by changing the incentives for the players,
#
what kind of cricket they were learning and refining.
#
And therefore brought forward a new breed of players in a manner of speaking,
#
which changed the grammar and language of the other forms of the game like test cricket,
#
which I argued in a column which got a lot of flak recently
#
that perhaps test cricket is destined to die in these modern times.
#
I can see why you got flak on that one.
#
But would you broadly say that?
#
I mean, we'll come to that when we come to that.
#
I have a strong point of view on that.
#
We might be in agreement.
#
So we'll come to that towards the end.
#
But in general, do you agree that these are the two main inflection points that we should be focusing on?
#
Yes, the first of those was not as much a cricketing inflection point
#
as a point that was forced upon India through the terrible financial position we were in, right?
#
We had three weeks of foreign currency reserves when Narsimha Rao became Prime Minister of India.
#
And I mean, it's fashionable not to talk about Narsimha Rao,
#
as it's fashionable not to talk about YV Red D,
#
as it's fashionable not to talk about these self-aggrandizing show ponies,
#
or whatever the expression is.
#
But because of that, we had no choice but to open the economy.
#
The biggest beneficiary of that was Tendulkar,
#
because the Pepsi's of the world came in.
#
I think Pepsi is actually a pretty good inflection point,
#
even though it's a brand that we talk about.
#
But Pepsi came in with big budgets.
#
And as a result, overseas television networks came into India.
#
And Dalmia and Bindra sat and questioned Doordarshan.
#
And Doordarshan was doing a magnificent job of killing cricket.
#
The coverage was banal.
#
I mean, you knew somebody.
#
I shouldn't say that because I did get a break on Doordarshan.
#
I cut my teeth in All India Radio.
#
I made all my mistakes there.
#
But there was no deep inner desire for excellence.
#
If you're writing a book and you want to win a major literary prize,
#
and you say, let me just write 200 words, that, right?
#
You don't win a prize like that.
#
You must have this great passion to be the best you can be.
#
And Doordarshan wasn't that.
#
The incentives are simply not tailored towards that.
#
And you cannot get the best talent for the prizes they were offering.
#
So I can understand the limitations they had.
#
But suddenly we got world-class television producers coming to India.
#
And that made a difference for people like me.
#
And what also happened in that period, just prior to all this,
#
was that Doordarshan actually used to demand money to broadcast matches.
#
And Dalmia and Bindra kind of turned this around
#
by just following through on the common sense that,
#
hey, why should we pay you money to broadcast?
#
You should pay us because look at the...
#
There's a fantastic story about that that Amrit Mathur told me about.
#
And Amrit was close to the board at the time.
#
When South Africa first came to India in late 1991,
#
and the SABC, the South African Broadcasting Corporation,
#
asked the question of the BCCI that nobody had ever asked before,
#
how much do you want for rights?
#
And they said, oh, we're supposed to get money for this.
#
And Amrit tells this story.
#
They said, let's ask this much.
#
And then somebody said, let's ask them.
#
And as it turns out, SABC offered more than the BCCI thought they could ever get.
#
And that is when they realized that they're sitting on a property
#
And that is how they went in revolt against Doordarshan.
#
And then it led to the famous court case
#
and the legal situation of who owns the airwaves
#
and whether uplinking is a fundamental right or no,
#
whether anyone can uplink or no.
#
And it changed the world of live broadcast.
#
But it also, because it brought in all these networks,
#
ESPN came in 95, Prime Sports was around,
#
and it became Star Sports.
#
It allowed people like me a break.
#
So I often tell people that across,
#
well, might be on different points on a logarithmic scale,
#
but the way Tendulkar benefited from liberalization,
#
in my profession, I benefited similarly,
#
even if the magnitude of the opportunity was vastly different.
#
But we all benefited from that.
#
Amrit, you, me, everyone,
#
all of India that was reasonably young at that time
#
benefited enormously from that one moment
#
and Manmohan Singh and Narsimha Rao
#
and all the people in North Block or South Block,
#
whatever it's called, sat together and produced that budget.
#
Right. And I mean, obviously under the,
#
I mean, they were forced to buy the IMF and all that.
#
That was just the way it was.
#
But regardless of that, that changed all our lives.
#
One of the interesting ways in which I tell people it changed is,
#
I mean, there are really two ways, it seems to me,
#
that that kind of changed.
#
One was that liberalization itself
#
empowered people in small towns in middle class India
#
And the sort of the demographic representation of the people
#
who could play cricket and aspire to, you know,
#
playing for India and all of that changed,
#
which is why you had more and more cricketers
#
in the northeast coming from the smaller towns.
#
And another way in which your broadcasting directly contributed
#
was that a lot more people would watch the game
#
and be exposed to values of modern cricket.
#
Like every time you praise a John T. Rhodes for doing what he's doing
#
or you praise people for running between wickets well
#
and grounding their bat properly,
#
those values are filtering down
#
into the young 12-year-old, 13-year-olds who are watching.
#
Rahul Dravid often tells me that the spread of television,
#
that television became the best coach a small town kid could get
#
because there he was watching Tendulkar
#
and he was hearing Benno and Greg and Gavaskar
#
and everybody talking about it.
#
And so it almost became like the coach he could never have got
#
because initially cricket knowledge was confined to the cities.
#
It was in Mumbai, it was in Bangalore, it was in Delhi,
#
it was in Chennai, it was in Hyderabad, whatever.
#
Look at where the 1983 World Cup team came from.
#
By the time Sehwag started, Zaheer started, all these guys,
#
the small town boys started feeling empowered
#
because they had learned a lot of their cricket from television.
#
And then you saw the revolution that led to 2007.
#
You saw the fire of small town India coming through.
#
And now we are well into that revolution
#
to the extent that the old nursery of Indian cricket,
#
which was the middle-income Mumbai boy
#
who became the India cricketer, will never ever play for India again.
#
I mean you could argue the middle-income Mumbai boy
#
quite naturally has a lot of things competing for his time,
#
a lot else to aspire to which he can realistically achieve,
#
while for many small town kids cricket is still that dream out there.
#
It is because the upside is huge and the downside is minimal.
#
For the middle-class boy who has to get the 10th standard and 12th standard marks,
#
the downside of not making it in cricket is huge,
#
the upside is, the kind of money now is huge anyway,
#
but the downside is huge as well.
#
I mean you wrote a very moving book on Azharuddin
#
and it kind of strikes me as a poignant thing
#
that he just got his timing all wrong in the sense
#
had he come into cricket 10 years later,
#
he would not have needed to or been tempted to go into those kinds of directions,
#
which you know cast a blemish on his,
#
you know if he was like born in 1997 and grew up in the IPL age and all that,
#
It is, I mean inadvertently,
#
we've stumbled onto one of the biggest problems of the IPL,
#
which is how do you get these children coming from lower to lower middle-class households
#
to feel comfortable with wealth and fame,
#
and it's something that affected people around that time as well,
#
match fixing and all that thing that happened,
#
which given our legal system, it's ridiculous,
#
it was never ever proved,
#
so we can't even say that it happened because it was never proved,
#
but we found that there are people who could get swayed by the riches
#
and other temptations on offer,
#
and hopefully now that that won't happen,
#
but there's so much money in the game now
#
that it is something we need to worry very, very carefully,
#
we need to be very concerned about it,
#
that there are people who don't know what 10 lakhs is,
#
who are getting 200 lakhs for playing six weeks,
#
and suddenly their family is now saying,
#
okay, one more zero, son, what does that mean?
#
How do we get them to stay focused on cricket,
#
keep practicing their skills,
#
and not say I'll come and bowl four overs,
#
pick up my paycheck and go,
#
because that paycheck goes as quickly as it comes.
#
And you've known cricketers from before the inflection point of the mid 90s,
#
or the early 90s, or whatever,
#
and you've known them afterwards,
#
and money has come into the game,
#
and also because of mass media,
#
there are suddenly superstars at an unprecedented level,
#
including young people who've come from small towns,
#
and out of nowhere they are superstars,
#
you know, like the Sehwag's and the Yuvraj,
#
and there's Zaheer and all those guys,
#
that first generation of small town kids in a sense, I suppose.
#
How did that change them? What did you see?
#
Like, was it harder to cope with that?
#
Did it get to their head?
#
Did it affect their cricket?
#
They were very lucky that,
#
I mean, Harbhajan had Anil Kumble,
#
for example, a Sehwag had a Tendulkar,
#
which is why in almost everywhere that I go,
#
I talk about the huge debt that Indian cricket owes
#
to those group of six or seven players,
#
Ganguly, Tendulkar, Laxman, Dravid, Srinath,
#
that group of people who came up from fairly similar backgrounds,
#
because cricketers used to come from middle class families,
#
and the middle class is still a storehouse of values.
#
So they were grounded middle class guys.
#
A storehouse of values.
#
The Indian middle class is a storehouse of the right values.
#
And they all came up from there.
#
You only had to see Rahul Dravid's father
#
to know that you can offer Rahul Dravid
#
the greatest temptation in the world,
#
and he won't be able to look his father in the eye.
#
You knew that, I mean, someone once told me,
#
if Tendulkar accepts money, then what is left?
#
And I said, go and look at Tendulkar's family.
#
There's no way on earth that can happen.
#
If Anil Kumble took money to perform badly,
#
for one, he wouldn't be Anil Kumble.
#
For two, I wouldn't be broadcasting.
#
So that group of people, and so the newcomers coming in
#
could see how grounded they were and how they were learning.
#
So that generation was very influenced.
#
The new generations, the Harbhajans, the Zahirs,
#
all these guys coming in were very heavily influenced
#
by this core group of seniors.
#
And I'm just kind of thinking aloud.
#
I mean, we often wonder about why in Pakistan
#
there is so much churn among players,
#
that, you know, people come and they go,
#
and very often you see the celebrity and the money
#
affecting them and they change behavior,
#
and they also seem to be more susceptible to
#
those kind of influences.
#
And one possibility could be that,
#
for a long time in Pakistan,
#
they said there is no middle class.
#
There is just your upper tier of really privileged elites,
#
and then everything is less than middle class,
#
and therefore perhaps those typically middle class values
#
which you're talking about simply weren't there.
#
Under Imran Khan, I can assure you,
#
absolutely nothing would have happened,
#
because Imran was one of the rare cricketing statesmen.
#
I don't know how good he is as a political leader,
#
but if Imran was in charge of world cricket,
#
cricket would be very different.
#
And so a lot of people grew under him,
#
and they were scared of him.
#
Thereafter, you see what's happening now in Pakistan cricket,
#
that there's a lot of talent coming through.
#
Has this always been, I think?
#
Because they don't have a proper training, coaching system,
#
a lot of this talent comes out raw.
#
And because it's raw, in T20,
#
everything that is a surprise is an advantage.
#
So I'm not surprised they are the number one T20 team in the world.
#
But what people don't realize is that two years later,
#
there's a completely different set of people playing for Pakistan.
#
there's another completely different set of people playing for Pakistan.
#
There are some survivors.
#
and Shoaib Malik is a survivor.
#
But otherwise, just look at the bowlers.
#
Two years ago, who was bowling for Pakistan?
#
Wahab Riaz, Muhammad Aamir.
#
They've lost, virtually lost Muhammad Aamir.
#
So I think they needed,
#
if they had the Dravid's and Tendulkar's and the Laxman's around them,
#
then they would have been different,
#
but that's their problem.
#
And would you say that the values that the Dravid and the Laxman and the Tendulkar epitomized are no longer there?
#
Oh, no, I don't say that.
#
I mean, I look at Ajinkar Rane.
#
I look at Chiteshwar Pujara.
#
And for all the outward appearance,
#
Virat Kohli retains a great love for the traditions of the game.
#
Virat Kohli, in the way he bats,
#
is as much a traditionalist as anybody else.
#
And nobody can ever say that Virat Kohli doesn't love the game enough.
#
So to that extent, it's all there.
#
But these are, we're talking of the complete top deck.
#
Do the younger players want to go through the turmoil of playing test match cricket?
#
Do they want to feel the ball going past their nose
#
when the moment that happens in a T20 game,
#
you're called one short ball for the over.
#
You can't play it again or whatever.
#
I think there'll be fewer and fewer people who now want to go through the rigor of playing test match cricket.
#
And if you're an Ishaan Sharma, you're an Ajinkar Rane,
#
you've reached a certain level playing a certain game,
#
the kid says, will they get an IPL contract?
#
So I don't know if the next kid wants to be a Pujara or an Ishaan Sharma,
#
or he wants to be someone who'll come with a peculiar reaction and bowl four overs.
#
In fact, it's interesting that when I spoke about the current generation,
#
the two players you named, I mean, Virat, of course, is exceptional and we'll come to him later,
#
but the two players you named, Rahane and Pujara, almost seem anachronistic.
#
Also in the way they play their cricket, which we'll come to,
#
which it doesn't seem to quite, you know,
#
they're almost sort of traditionalist players who would have been greats,
#
maybe a generation earlier, but now you kind of wonder, do they really fit in?
#
Pujara would probably have been far better off playing in an earlier era,
#
because he's now under pressure to deliver every time.
#
I think we've made a couple of good players very insecure,
#
the Pujaras and the Rahanes, and even to some extent, Ravi Chandan and Ashwin.
#
Ashwin is a kumle incarnation.
#
He's the same height, the similar education, love, similar intelligence, similar things.
#
And just as kumle was told all his life that you don't turn a ball and he took 600 wickets,
#
Ashwin, we're always searching for what Ashwin cannot do when he's got 330 test wickets.
#
And yet we are finding reasons to keep leaving Ashwin out.
#
And I mean, we go across the world and they laugh at us.
#
He's got 330 wickets, he's got to 300 faster than anybody in the history of the game.
#
And we say, yeah, that's because he bowled in those conditions.
#
Jimmy Anderson has just come to Sri Lanka.
#
He's played two test matches, got one wicket,
#
and he says he feels like a fish out of water and he's not playing the next test match.
#
And here's a spinner who, kumle took three, four turns to learn to bowl overseas.
#
But anyway, to come back to the point that these three people are classic old fashioned players.
#
It's interesting where they come from.
#
Rahane comes from middle class Mumbai.
#
Pujara comes from a father who was so much in love with the way cricket was played
#
that he made him that kind of player.
#
And Ashwin comes from, I don't think he comes from Chennai, I think he comes from Madras.
#
Do you think Ashwin should be in the one day side?
#
It depends on his, I think it's his fielding that's letting him down.
#
Because today, in the way Virat Kohli wants to construct a side,
#
he wants the 15 runs, the 10 runs that Jadeja will save for him in the field.
#
And Jadeja is, I mean, I think his yuvraj at his peak is that standard as a fielder.
#
So the moment Ashwin is a little slow chasing the ball to third man,
#
you start to think, oops, that's another single gone there.
#
That's another two runs gone there.
#
But I would definitely have him because at number seven, you still want someone who can bat.
#
We hardly have people who can bat and bowl.
#
I would definitely have him in the mix.
#
Ashwin, Jadeja and the two wrist spinners and Krunal Pandya.
#
Your five stock spinners, all remarkable players.
#
We'll take a quick commercial break and then we'll come back and talk about the other great inflection point, the IPL revolution.
#
The sixth string of Vilayat Khan.
#
On the scene and the on-scene, Amit Verma's guest is a cricket commentator and journalist whose voice most cricket fans can identify.
#
I hope you guessed that it's Harsha Bhogle.
#
He spoke to Amit about the evolution of Indian cricket, its rise and the changes that he has witnessed over the years.
#
Really, really great episode and we're really excited to have Harsha on the network.
#
Please definitely check it out.
#
We also launched a brand new show called The Paperback Podcast hosted by Rachita Sharma and Satyajit Roy.
#
Every week they'll talk to industry experts about five of their favorite nonfiction books.
#
The first episode featuring Apurva Damani of Artha Ventures is out on the fifth.
#
On the Rediscovery Podcast final episode of this season, Ambika and Hosra talked to Pankil Shah and Sumit Kampir.
#
They talked food, travel and the secret ingredients to a decade of managing Indian restaurants.
#
Pankil and Sumit were also participants in our other show, the Kolaba Cartel.
#
So definitely be a fun conversation and definitely check them out.
#
And with that, let's move on with the shows.
#
Welcome back to the scene and the on-scene.
#
I'm chatting with Harsha Bhogle about the evolution of cricket in his lifetime.
#
You know, T20 cricket changed so much, not just in terms of commerce, in the sense that it brought a new viewership to the game.
#
And it also allowed a much wider pool of people to make a living than was otherwise happening.
#
But it also changed the sort of the way people played their cricket.
#
Like, you know, before the break, you were talking about how the 10 runs that Jadeja might save over Ashwin.
#
They matter far more in limited powers formats and people are kind of recognizing that.
#
In a T20 game, even a single run saved can be a big deal.
#
And equally, it also to some extent explains a rise of wrist spinners.
#
I think the wrist spinners are coming in for a reason, which is that a lot of people with big bats are hitting through the line and mishits are going for six.
#
The single greatest criminal act in T20 cricket is to bring the boundary ropes in.
#
And so mishits are going for six.
#
As a result, anything that deviates off the surface, people are finding it difficult.
#
You notice no one can play swing bowling anymore.
#
I was in England earlier this year and I asked somebody, I said, is swing outlawed?
#
Is the people not allowed to swing the ball anymore?
#
So the moment the wrist spinner turns the ball, when you attack the wrist spinner, you're playing into his hands.
#
The same wrist spinners cannot buy a wicket in test match cricket.
#
Sudip Yadav is not yet a test match cricketer. Chahal has not even been considered for test match cricket.
#
Imran Tahir is not a test match cricketer.
#
Rashid Khan, the world's number one T20 player couldn't bowl a spell right in the test match.
#
Sunil Narayan is not a test match cricketer.
#
Look at all these spinners that are doing well.
#
They don't do well in test match cricket because batsmen are not charging and hitting them through the line.
#
But they are waiting and milking them for a single.
#
And all of a sudden, they don't have the guile to get them out.
#
So that's a change that T20 has happened.
#
It's brought about bowlers who are very good when they are attacked.
#
And the batsman has no choice but to attack because the run rate is hovering over his head.
#
That's the grammar of the game.
#
And that also buttresses the point that T20 and test cricket, you know, calling them both cricket sort of implies they are the same sport.
#
And they are not the same sport.
#
They are different sports with different imperatives and different demands.
#
And I would not even say one is necessarily superior to the other.
#
That's a question of taste and nostalgia and those playing to it.
#
But, you know, the argument I made when I spoke about why test cricket might be dying is that
#
because T20 is so much more lucrative for young people coming into the game
#
because there's a much better chance of grabbing an IPL contract and making a lot of money that way
#
rather than actually play for play test cricket for India.
#
You know, young cricketers are incentivized to tailor their skills towards T20 cricket,
#
which is why you might end up with a generation which cannot play swing bowling anymore, as you pointed out.
#
You might never, for example, have a good test series in England because those skills are simply gone.
#
It's rather a worry you share.
#
There's another reason.
#
Just imagine now that you're a television network that is keeping our game alive
#
by the vast amounts of money you're pumping into the game.
#
And you're paying, what, 40, 50 crores a day, suppose.
#
I think it's more than that, but whatever.
#
Let's assume it's 40, 50 crores a day.
#
And there is India versus West Indies.
#
They're not allowed to play the fourth day.
#
So suddenly fourth day gone, fifth day gone, but your contract requires you to pay that money, right?
#
So straight away your 200 crores has gone to charity.
#
Why would you want to put so much money in test match cricket?
#
A lot of people say they're watching test match cricket and they say test match cricket is the ultimate
#
and test match cricket is the greatest.
#
Yeah, Mother Teresa was too.
#
These are all Mother Teresa statements.
#
If you are that interested in the game, then you buy a ticket and go and watch the game.
#
If you're that interested in the game, you sit in front of your television,
#
you use the viewership figures and get people to advertise on it and be part of the cricket economy.
#
If you're merely following scores on Crick Buzz, you're not contributing to the test match cricket economy.
#
You're still saying, I like test cricket, but you're doing nothing for its sustenance.
#
It's like saying, you know, I like poverty alleviation, but now I'll go and have a gin and tonic.
#
So you've got to actually actively participate in that.
#
And that's not happening.
#
So test cricket will survive.
#
I'm not saying test cricket will die.
#
Test cricket will survive because it's got too much going for it.
#
You'll never otherwise get 50 days of live cricket on a telecast.
#
Telecast needs Dal Chawal as well.
#
So that is test cricket.
#
And even now there is a Kohli generation that says we love test match cricket,
#
that wants to do well in test match cricket.
#
The records go back 140 years and you can compare over 140 years.
#
T20 is like the 17th Premiership game.
#
Do you remember what happened between Arsenal and Southampton?
#
Do you remember what happened between North East United and Mumbai AFC?
#
T20 cricket is like that.
#
You come there, have your fun and you go back.
#
There's no place for a T20 game in history.
#
It's like Major League Baseball.
#
Do you know what happened in the 42nd game?
#
So records are maintained over a period of time.
#
And so a particular performance gets forgotten very quickly.
#
So that is why I think test cricket will survive.
#
The reason I want test cricket to never die is because test cricket is the greatest manifestation of life on a sporting field.
#
You get a second chance.
#
You have to grind your way out of trouble.
#
We all go through situations in life where we think the world is against us.
#
That's two fast bowlers bowling at you on a green track.
#
But you don't give your wicket away.
#
You hang in and you hang in and you hang in.
#
And then when the other bowler comes, you squeeze a single here and you squeeze a single there.
#
That is what we do in life and we're going through a difficult phase.
#
So I hope test cricket never goes.
#
But I think test cricket will become what marketing people probably call the loss leader.
#
It will continue to make losses.
#
It will be funded by T20.
#
I mean, you'll find people say, no, it doesn't make losses.
#
I mean, you must ask people who put money behind sport.
#
My sort of dipstick is media buyers.
#
I think media buyers understand the market better than anybody else because they're spending someone else's money.
#
They have skin in the game.
#
If you ask them bid for test cricket alone, ask them what percentage of the bid they would put in if they would put in a bid at all.
#
You'll get some very interesting answers.
#
I've asked that question, but I've got those answers in confidence.
#
But it'll be very interesting to ask people this massive billion dollar television contracts.
#
If you had to bid separately for test match cricket, how much would you bid?
#
What percentage if at all?
#
And you know, like you, I love test cricket and you put it so beautifully.
#
Manifestation of life on a cricket field.
#
I think it reveals character like no other sport can and no other form of cricket, which are different sports anyway.
#
And like you, I hope it survives and continues to be subsidized by T20 cricket as is no doubt the case.
#
But a lot of people who express these sentiments also are just to use that popular phrase these days, virtue signaling.
#
They're not actually putting the money with them out.
#
They're like the Manchester United fans.
#
I don't actually I don't know anything about English football, but my club is Manchester United.
#
They're a hardcore United supporters.
#
But if I don't know anything about Premiership, I'm United, you know, it's like that.
#
A lot of people who have no idea about the glory about all the elements of test match cricket will tell you I love test match cricket.
#
As if to say that T20 cricket is full of chemicals and preservatives that are going to kill you the moment you eat it.
#
No, T20 cricket is extraordinarily skilled cricket, extraordinary skills.
#
You are someone to score 12 in three balls to win a game.
#
You have to have skills.
#
You have to have presence of mind.
#
You have to be there to be able to win it.
#
You've got to know one mistake and I'm gone.
#
It just requires a completely different set of skills.
#
Right. It's not that one set of skills is necessarily superior or inferior to the other skills.
#
They're just different skills and time becomes a great element.
#
Time becomes a great restraint and a great challenge in the shorter forms of the game.
#
And therefore you have to develop skills according to that.
#
And the interesting thing is you pointed out how Kohli still loves test cricket.
#
But one reason for that could be that Kohli sort of grew up as a kid in the generation which held Tendulkar and Dravid and all these guys on all.
#
And he got some of those values.
#
But I mean I don't know any of the kids today personally but will say Hardik Pandya and so on still revere test cricket in that way?
#
They might pay lip service to it because they've seen their captain do it.
#
They will say that I have this fantasy world I want to reside in once where a truth serum exists.
#
Where every time I see someone I just creep up from behind and jab a truth serum into them and now they have to tell the truth.
#
Wasn't there a Jim Carrey movie like that? Something like that.
#
And then I'd love to hear what people have to say about test match cricket.
#
To see whether they actually want to enjoy it the same way or not.
#
They call it dumbing down? Yes it is.
#
It's dumbing down by your definition of what you should be.
#
It's because it's our intellectual level. It's not kids.
#
It's not the kind of poetry we studied when we were children.
#
Look at Chetan Bhagat. Look at.
#
He sells books. He's writing to a different audience.
#
Someone else writes to a different audience.
#
There was a Satyajit Ray movie. There was a Manmohan Desai movie.
#
So you choose what you get. You pick what you want.
#
And it's not even the same kind of difference.
#
I mean it's the anchoring effect that we're used to cricket being over five days.
#
You know if test cricket did not exist and T20s were the dominant form of the game
#
and then somebody said hey I have a brain wave. Let's play this over five days.
#
You'd laugh him out of the room the same way if someone said that a football match should not be 90 minutes.
#
Let's have a six hour game. And you'd laugh him out of the room.
#
And the skills required for that would be completely different.
#
But they wouldn't necessarily be romanticized over this one.
#
You know you said something. Is it really cricket as we knew it?
#
The laws are largely the same.
#
There are little playing conditions here and there that are different.
#
Like football spawned futsal. Should we call cricket Quicket?
#
And say okay that was cricket. This is Quicket. You know let's play this.
#
But eventually you know the romantics always have to bow to commerce.
#
Whether you're a broadcaster who wants to radio and moves to television
#
or whether you want to play limited overs cricket.
#
I mean there's just no comparison. Look what AB de Villiers has done.
#
Mind-blowing. What do you think of AB de Villiers?
#
I mean I used to say at one point that partly because of the imperatives of the new kind of cricket
#
that he is more skilled than any other batsman in the history of the game
#
because of the 360 degree game.
#
I'm just a bit worried about that because we have seen a certain set of people.
#
We have not seen say Lara in his prime.
#
There was not that much television or even going further back.
#
So if we consign that, if we confine it to the period under our observation,
#
The things he does on a cricket ground that should be outlawed, that should not be allowed.
#
The other day he hit a switch at six over mid-wicket.
#
I mean I admire the switch hit. I think it should never have a place in cricket
#
because it's so against the bowler.
#
But he can hit a switch at six. He can lap a six over a fine leg.
#
He can reverse lap it over third man.
#
And he's doing that to Dale Steyn.
#
He's hitting a hundred of 31 balls, Samit.
#
Hundred of 31 balls. I told someone the other day.
#
I said you know I used to be playing book cricket and I didn't even score 131 balls in book cricket.
#
I used to play book cricket as well. Who remembers book cricket?
#
Outrageous. That talent is just outrageous.
#
And then he plays 240 balls to score 25 or 30.
#
Because that's what the game demanded.
#
And he can do that too.
#
And he can do that too. What a player.
#
And also another amazing player, Virat Kohli, where he'll have a similar impact
#
but without all these switch hits, just playing the orthodox game to a different purpose.
#
2016 or 2017, the IPL just come and go so quickly.
#
He almost got a thousand runs in the IPL.
#
I think he got about 974, the same as Bradman's series record.
#
No switch hit, no lap shots, just proper, correct cricket shots.
#
In the last three years, the evolution of Virat Kohli has been as thrilling to watch
#
as the evolution of any great player in the history of the game.
#
And I just thought the way he played in England earlier this year.
#
He was lucky. Everybody is lucky.
#
Tendulkar was lucky. Dravid was lucky. Sobers was lucky.
#
You make your own luck.
#
I mean, on 20, playing and missing against Anderson, he gets dropped by David Malan.
#
And then he goes and scores 100. He made 530 runs in that series.
#
The last time he went there, he played 140.
#
And the way he played Anderson, he just said, I will not get out to Anderson.
#
He played and missed, yes, but he could just see the ferocious desire.
#
To me, Kohli versus Anderson this year was like a sermon being delivered
#
on the greatness of test match cricket.
#
Because Anderson could not be taken off after two overs.
#
You could not suddenly say, but I can't have more than one slip.
#
I must have five fielders outside the circle.
#
No prisoners taken. No chance.
#
He's not going anywhere for the next nine overs.
#
You've got 54 balls coming at you. You better play them.
#
And I can have six around the bat. I can have seven. I can do what I want.
#
Now every ball is an exam.
#
You didn't like thermodynamics, right?
#
There are 54 thermodynamics papers coming at you one after the other.
#
So to me, I mean, I would watch Anderson.
#
And you know, in England, if you leave a ball that you meant to play
#
and you just leave it, those crowds out there will go, well left young man.
#
Because they'll get it. They'll get what's up.
#
Well left young man, yeah.
#
If you want to enjoy test cricket, go to the boxing day test.
#
But that's in Melbourne where you're one of 90,000. You're an ant.
#
Go to England and watch test match cricket. They'll clap. They clap everybody.
#
In our country, we're reaching a stage. We're not allowed to clap for the opposition.
#
So tell me something, 10 years ago, 11 years ago when Kohli kind of first started appearing on the scene
#
when he got, you know, when he came out of the under 19 ranks
#
and he was sort of promoted up to the senior ranks.
#
With a temper and a tattoo.
#
Yeah. Did you have a sense that he will become this?
#
No. I mean, it's very easy to say I spotted that talent.
#
Nobody did. Nobody did. Nobody did.
#
In fact, we still said the moving ball as late as 2014.
#
We were saying, wow, what a player, but you know what?
#
The moving ball troubles him.
#
And I think it's come about. You see Kohli and you see arrogance
#
and you see Kohli and you think my way or the highway.
#
You see Kohli and you think I want this, this, this. This is how it should be played.
#
What you do not see is the extraordinary discipline that has taken him where he has reached.
#
And that has not changed in the game over the last 100 years.
#
Just knowing what is right for you, having the great perseverance to actually go and do that.
#
Nobody becomes great in test match cricket without, without having worked backside off.
#
And there is a sense of stereotype that, oh, he's a very aggressive guy.
#
But I think what people don't realize is that the aggression is not just in the MCBC gullies on the field
#
or that kind of behavior.
#
That aggression is something that goes into his work ethic and that produces that intense hunger,
#
which has, I mean, I think he probably has a greatest work ethic of any sports person I can remember.
#
I mean, I can't remember a fitter Indian cricket and, you know, to turn himself from that teenager who we remember.
#
But you see, he also had outstanding fitness trainers.
#
He also had great dieticians.
#
I have seen Rahul Dravid in a gym lifting weights and Rahul Dravid was putting his body through.
#
His body was complaining and screaming in 12 different languages.
#
But he was still doing it.
#
And when I was walking on the treadmill next door and I said to him after, I said, Rahul, why are you doing all this?
#
He said, I'm well over 30 now.
#
I've got to be fitter than the next guy to survive.
#
Rahul Dravid's work ethic, Tendulkar's work ethic was just unbelievable.
#
What we are seeing with Kohli now is the chiseling of ability,
#
but he's got the best tools that an earlier generation did not have.
#
He's got the technology, those guys.
#
He does. But the aggression does spill over as well.
#
It's not only in, it does spill over.
#
So when you kind of look back over this journey, like you started well before these inflection points.
#
You really started reporting at a time where you still had potbelly cricketers on the field sometimes.
#
And there was a whole different sort of pace of playing and media meant something completely different and all of that.
#
And you've sort of traveled all this distance and you look at the cricketers today.
#
And is it really the same game?
#
Are the things you loved about cricket still there?
#
Have you found new things to love?
#
Earlier you could love one game, now you can love three.
#
Earlier you could only love test match cricket.
#
Now you can love test match cricket, you can love one-day international cricket, and you can love T20.
#
You can have a Dhoni who never really enjoyed test match cricket.
#
In T20, he was a fine player, but Dhoni, the one-day cricketer?
#
Now, if there was no one-day cricket, would we have seen the glory of Dhoni?
#
Maybe the finest limited over one-day player ever to play for India.
#
But would you have enjoyed Dhoni if you had not had that form of cricket?
#
If you had only test match cricket, would we have really appreciated the glory of Dhoni?
#
If you had only T20, would Dhoni have been just one among other fantastic players?
#
But ODI allowed you to do that.
#
So, cricket's now given us three things to drool over, to enjoy.
#
Earlier it gave you only one.
#
And you briefly referred earlier to how it's changed lives.
#
The arrival of T20 has changed so many lower middle-class Indian houses,
#
because earlier only 15 could play for India, 20 could aspire to play for India.
#
Well, in the short list to play for India.
#
And now 120 can make a career.
#
If you can't, you'll get a couple of lakhs if you're a good player playing the Tamil Nadu Premier League.
#
And then you break into the Ranji Trophy, you'll make another 8-10 lakhs if you're playing every game.
#
So, what the IPL has done is incredible.
#
It's lifted people out from where they were.
#
So, I have a lot of time for IPL and ODIs, but you're right.
#
The arrival of colour television in the 80s, the liberalisation of the early 90s,
#
and the World T20 of 2007 that led to the arrival of IPL would probably be the three biggest things.
#
For Indian cricket, if you're going a little further back, of course, the arrival of Kerry Packer.
#
The arrival of Kerry Packer and the removal of those old-fashioned ways of looking at test cricket,
#
where the player's finances came last.
#
I had a great episode with Gideon Hay and Prem Panikkarund.
#
Gideon, of course, wrote a book about the whole Kerry Packer revolution and so on.
#
So, we spoke about Kerry Packer and the IPL in a sense.
#
And, you know, before the IPL started, there were lots of sceptics about how the game will be corrupted.
#
And I remember writing a column in Crick and Fire that I'm arguing exactly the same things,
#
that just in terms of the impact it's going to have the cricketers themselves, it is absurd to oppose it.
#
Because it will just make it, the money will spread out so much.
#
It will finally become...
#
Amit, I read a lovely line.
#
If you heard this line from me before, pardon me.
#
I read a lovely line about seven, eight years ago.
#
It said that influencers in society are always one generation behind reality.
#
And you can see that in our game everywhere.
#
The people who run our game are one generation behind the consumers of the game.
#
Just as a consumer marketer in his 40s or 50s has to live with the challenge of knowing what a 20-something kid wants to buy
#
or a family that's earning 10,000 rupees a month in a family of six needs to do.
#
He has to understand that.
#
Similarly, the people running the game have to understand what the 20-somethings feel about the game.
#
We can't say, oh, there's only girls and women, we don't care about them.
#
No, they're now in, what, almost 30% of your audience.
#
So, every time something new comes, people will say our game is no longer the same.
#
Pajama cricket, it rescued cricket.
#
P20 cricket came, it rescued cricket.
#
And has this realization of the change filtered down to the commentary box?
#
I mean, if you look at the demographic profile of commentary boxes, you've got a lot of old people.
#
You've got the venerable Mr. Gavaskar in his 70s.
#
Have they kind of, was that a slow process where they began to figure out what's happening?
#
Is there still a sense of denial?
#
It's a very, no, I don't think they don't like T20 cricket.
#
But T20 cricket requires a very different kind of broadcast.
#
In T20 cricket, you've got to keep pace with the action as well.
#
Whereas in test match cricket, sometimes you can just pause and let it go and the wind is blowing by.
#
What a lovely, oh, I say, what a shot that was.
#
In T20, you've got to be up there with the action.
#
Very often with the commercial intrusion, you have to say in 10 words what you would like to say in 40.
#
So it's a very different kind of game.
#
I absolutely enjoy doing it.
#
If you ask me what is the one broadcast you'd like to do, it'd be the last four overs of a T20 game.
#
Because that's when the excitement is building up.
#
Every ball is so critical.
#
So it has changed, yes.
#
But overall, broadcasting has changed.
#
The producers are demanding different things from broadcasters than they did.
#
It's still irritating to just repeat what you've just seen.
#
But the game needs more storytellers than ever before.
#
Because someone's watching at home, he doesn't want a lesson in physics.
#
On a straight line on where the head is, where the knee is, where the toe is and see how it's moving.
#
Yes, you need to know that.
#
But the lady in Gulbargarh is not interested.
#
The lady in Gulbargarh wants to know why is Virat Kohli getting it right?
#
What is Virat Kohli going to do in this situation?
#
So you need storytellers.
#
And I'm overjoyed that this year both Fox and Channel 7 in Australia,
#
post the Channel 9 rights transfer, have said we're going to go back the old television way,
#
which is having callers and summarizers.
#
The callers have seen the game for a long time.
#
They place all the action in perspective.
#
They don't tell you what is right or wrong.
#
That they get the summarizer to say, oh, sometimes they say, oh, they're not a great ball.
#
But very clearly defined.
#
Cricket is the only sport that has gone all-player.
#
Football is the biggest game in the world.
#
Every sport has callers because it's a completely different skill.
#
It's a very different skill to be able to keep pace with the game,
#
to be able to find the words for the narrative.
#
I mean, without Tony Gregg's commentary on Desert Storm,
#
would Tendulkar's innings have had the same impact?
#
I mean, I remember when Tendulkar was doing that walk around Wan Kede Stadium.
#
There's a young producer of ours.
#
He just nudged me and said, you.
#
And I said, he said, yeah, you know, Sachin, since he was 14,
#
you'll understand this moment better.
#
And I got to describe that last moment of Tendulkar.
#
And I could add all the feeling because I knew exactly what was going on through his mind.
#
And Ian Bishop was sitting next to me.
#
But when Carlos Brathwaite hit the four sixes,
#
nobody knew what it meant more than Ian Bishop did.
#
And so Bishop was able to get the best words out.
#
So you still need to be a storyteller.
#
If you've played international cricket at the highest level
#
and you're an excellent storyteller without the ego to understand
#
just what the man in the street wants,
#
you have a huge advantage over someone like me who's not played the game.
#
But sport needs storytellers.
#
And is it going to happen on television?
#
Because a prototype of you, a young Harsha Bhogle,
#
who is 16 years old today and wants to get into commentary,
#
he's not going to get in because it's all celebs and ex-cricketers basically.
#
But other media he possibly can.
#
And that is the next revolution that is coming,
#
which is what we are doing.
#
Or what you and me are doing just now.
#
No force on earth can stop you from having your own channel.
#
Digital is going to revolutionize it, already is around the world.
#
It's going to revolutionize opinion in sport.
#
All along we were told, what's your batting average?
#
You're not allowed to have an opinion.
#
Now there's this kid coming out of college who knows every number in the world
#
and he's projecting those numbers through an algorithm.
#
He's creating a predictive algorithm.
#
And he's telling the expert, I think this is what's going to happen.
#
And he's got as much chance of that coming right as the expert does.
#
And so we will start having different kinds of broadcasts.
#
I said that about three years ago.
#
I said you must have for the very same match four different kinds of broadcasts.
#
You must have the expert-expert broadcast for the hardcore lover of the game.
#
He wants to know technically what is happening, what is right, what's going on.
#
You must have the storytellers broadcast.
#
You must have the nerds broadcast.
#
And you must have a broadcast with no commentary.
#
I mean you can actually potentially have unlimited audio feeds which you provide,
#
which people can watch along with the live images in front of them.
#
So that is what people do in other countries.
#
They listen to the radio broadcast and watch the telecast.
#
And is that something you're excited to do going forward?
#
I would be overjoyed by it.
#
I mean I see the talent among young people.
#
Young India today is an outrageously talented country.
#
We have no right to tell a 17-year-old kid who understands sports so well,
#
because you don't have a batting average, you are not allowed to enter this community.
#
This game belongs to all of us.
#
We said you are not in the cities, you can't play the game.
#
Then the people in the small towns came, we said you are a woman, you can't play the game.
#
Then we said you are disabled, you are physically challenged, you cannot play the game.
#
The visually challenged have a right to play the game.
#
The deaf and dumb have a right to play the game.
#
They are having their own World Cup.
#
The women's World Cup now is showing us.
#
You watch Smriti Vandana and Mitali Raj and Harpon Triit cover play.
#
Who decided that they cannot play cricket?
#
Similarly, who decided you cannot have an opinion on the game?
#
The television networks will go box office and it's there.
#
Shah Rukh Khan is box office, Aamir Khan is box office.
#
You and me will never get to play that role.
#
But digital is now allowing everybody to have a voice.
#
And it's actually right for disruption.
#
What's to stop two young kids, 18-19 years old, to have a discussion on the game?
#
They may not have the reach of television,
#
but digital has a great way of just taking things to people that you never thought it would reach.
#
And what to find at this level?
#
Who decides that you don't have an opinion?
#
Earlier there was a sub-editor who didn't allow your article to get published.
#
And there was only one newspaper in each city.
#
So if the sub-editor didn't like you, you published yourself.
#
I mean, you wrote on the tree or something, whatever.
#
Then came the television networks.
#
And the television networks invest so much money in it, they have to go box office.
#
It's like I want to make a Shah Rukh Khan movie.
#
My movie is already costing 100 and 200 crores.
#
I have to have the big stars in it.
#
I have to have the masala.
#
I have to have the song.
#
I have to have whatever.
#
But what are we seeing in cinema today?
#
We are seeing Badhai Ho competing with Thugs of Hindustan.
#
What is the comparison?
#
That will happen in digital.
#
We will get to a stage, and I don't know what the law is, what the rights will be.
#
We will get to a stage where there will be young people sitting and having a ball,
#
watching the telecast and people just following that soundtrack with the action.
#
And I hope some young people listening to this podcast now take inspiration from your words.
#
I mean, sometimes I meet these young people and I say,
#
what would I give to be 30 years younger today?
#
I mean, I see young India and I go, wow, just the sheer ability.
#
And we cannot stand in the way of young people getting into broadcast.
#
And digital is going to help them do that.
#
So I'll end this episode with sort of a final question that,
#
you've been with cricket, you've been part of cricket for more than two and a half decades,
#
What gives you hope about the future of the game and what causes you worry?
#
This game has been written off so many times.
#
Just as India as a nation has been written off so many times and India bounces back,
#
we are a powerful country at the moment.
#
Cricket will never die because cricket is embedded in our thoughts.
#
Cricket is embedded in our culture.
#
The president of India goes to Australia and he is delivering cricketing parallels.
#
Australia is trying to invest heavily into India.
#
What do the two countries have in common?
#
They did some research and they said the Kangaroo and Bradman are the two most known names across in India.
#
Then it came to border, then it came to war, then it whatever.
#
Then it came to sledging, which is for better or worse.
#
But cricket will never die out of India and T20 will take cricket to places that we never thought cricket would reach.
#
It may not go to China, it may not go to the US,
#
but we have to stop this obsession that everything in life has to go to China and the US.
#
Cricket is being played in Fiji, in Papua New Guinea.
#
There are 105 countries playing.
#
T20 cricket will be the missionary that our game needed.
#
Test cricket was, you know, stiff apple, it was a closed club.
#
Hello there, do you have your shoes tied properly?
#
No, your jacket is in button.
#
Only six of you can play the game.
#
No, T20 will take it to 100 countries.
#
And that I see, I see T20 as a missionary of the game that will bring people in
#
and then they will start to say, you know what, this test cricket looks like an interesting thing.
#
So if you like test cricket, stop trampling on T20 cricket
#
and realize that T20 cricket is the gateway that's going to draw people into your hidden house right at the end.
#
The two things that excite me the most are where T20 is taking cricket.
#
Rashid Khan was telling me the story, he said he went to a camp that his friend was running
#
and he said, you are now famous, you must come and inaugurate my camp.
#
He said there were 126 bowlers there.
#
126 bowlers and he thought, there will be a left arm or there will be a fast bowler.
#
126 leg spinners growing up in Afghanistan.
#
Try and find me that hunger somewhere else.
#
And did you think Afghanistan would do well?
#
Do you think Oman would do well?
#
Again, Nepal, Sandeep Lamichhani from Nepal comes and he's good enough to win an IPL contract
#
and play for Delhi Daredevils.
#
But we were not allowing the Nepal's and the Afghanistan's to play cricket
#
because we said it's not for, you know, they can't.
#
So for too long, cricket has prevented people from entering its fold.
#
Cricket has to allow everybody into its fold.
#
So I'm excited about where T20 will take our game
#
and I'm excited about the next generation of opinion makers that digital will allow in
#
to break this closed field that the enormity of television is bound by.
#
That's an incredibly inspiring note to end on.
#
Thank you so much for coming on my show.
#
If you enjoyed listening to that episode, you can follow Harsha on Twitter at bhoglehharsha.
#
You can follow me on Twitter at amitvarma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
And you can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in or thinkpragati.com.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
Hey, this is Shiladitya Mukhopadhyay.
#
And we host Shunya One, the weekly podcast based on conversations about startups, entrepreneurship,
#
across verticals like food tech or fintech, and digital payments, logistics, e-commerce,
#
and of course, all the stuff from VCs and investors as well.
#
Over the course of our run, we've had some really great entrepreneurs.
#
We've had Dishan Hayat from Topper, Naya Sagi from Baby Chakra,
#
Ankur Sachdev from ShareChat, and Akrit from Haptic, among many, many more.
#
Yep. And we continue to get some of the biggest, smartest, and most innovative folks in the country,
#
in this space, coming here, talking to us, all for you guys to listen to.
#
So tune in every Tuesday on the IVM app website or wherever you get your podcasts from,
#
and get a chance to be a part of all of the tech banter and entrepreneurial conversations on our Slack channel.
#
Talk to our guests. They show up as well.
#
All you have to do is request and invite on ivmpodcast.com slash junior one.
